Drafted by Marx between 22 and 29 November 1864 and adopted by the Central Council of the International Workingmen’s Association on 29 November; transmitted to President Lincoln through the American minister in London, Charles Francis Adams, on 23 December 1864; published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper (London), No. 169, 7 January 1865, and in German in Der Social-Demokrat (Berlin), 30 December 1864. Text of the address as printed by the United States Government in Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the First Session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, Part I, Washington, 1866, pp. 64-65 (Adams to Seward, No. 844, enclosure). Two misprints corrected (“tocsin”, “betters”); the names of the signatories, badly garbled in that print, are given in the order and spelling of the German edition (Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 16). Traducción al español.

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority.

If resistance to the slave power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war-cry of your re-election is death to slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destinies of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant, or prostituted by the tramp of the slave-driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, slavery on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the 18th century; when on those very spots counter revolution with systematic thoroughness gloried in rescinding “the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old Constitution” and maintained “slavery to be a beneficent institution, indeed the only solution of the great problem of the relation of labor to capital,” and cynically proclaimed property in man “the corner-stone of the new edifice,” then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests, were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore, therefore, patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention importunities of their “betters,” and from most parts of Europe contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political power of the north, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American anti-slavery war will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come, that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the simple minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race, and the reconstruction of a social world.

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association,
THE CENTRAL COUNCIL:

Le Lubez, corresponding secretary for France; F. Rybczinsky (Poland); Emile Holtorp (Poland); J. B. Bocquet; H. Jung, corresponding secretary for Switzerland; Morisot; George W. Wheeler; J. Denoual; P. Bordage; Le Roux; Tallandier; Jourdain; Dupont; R. Gray; D. Lama; C. Setacci; F. Solustri; P. Aldovrandi; D. G. Bagnagatti; G. P. Fontana, corresponding secretary for Italy; G. Lake; J. Buckley; G. Howell; J. Osborne; J. D. Stainsby; J. Grossmith; G. Eccarius; Friedrich Leßner; Wolff; K. Kaub; Heinrich Bolleter; Ludwig Otto; N. P. Hansen (Denmark); Karl Pfänder; Georg Lochner; Peter Petersen; Karl Marx, corresponding secretary for Germany; A. Dick; L. Wolf; J. Whitlock; J. Carter; W. Morgan; William Dell; John Weston; Peter Fox; Robert Shaw; John M. Longmaid; Robert Henry Side; William C. Worley; Blockmoor; R. Hartwell; W. Pidgeon; B. Lucraft; J. Nieass.

G. Odger, President of Council.
William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.